Data storage has figuratively speaking, over the years, been managed in islands, especially for home users or small private businesses. Meanwhile, the complexity and amount of data being used and stored by home users is growing significantly especially with the popularity of digital imaging from still and video cameras. In such environments, there has typically been no resource sharing or centralized management among these islands.
If a home user, or a small business suffers a crashed hard disk or other data storage failure than precious irreplaceable data could be lost forever. Backing up some data to plug-in devices may provide some protection but it is limited because a calamity such as a fire at the home can destroy the device also. The costs of offsite data protection used by large businesses such as remotely located redundant storage arrays is prohibitively expensive for home users and typically also for small businesses. But, it would advance the art to provide a system, method, and/or architecture that would overcome such and related problems in an economically attractive fashion.